


Beauty Came Like The Setting Sun

by harryhotspur



Series: the book of love is long and boring [4]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Christmas, Christmas Truce of 1914, Gifts, Historical, Love Languages, M/M, Pre-Canon, Receiving Gifts, War, World War I, implied / referenced death, softness in very harsh times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:48:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27965570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harryhotspur/pseuds/harryhotspur
Summary: December 1914. As the world is poised at the beginning of World War One, the trenches of the Western Front are a tough setting to spend Christmas. But even in the horror and the bleakness, there were a few small miracles that year...
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: the book of love is long and boring [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1917394
Comments: 31
Kudos: 75





	Beauty Came Like The Setting Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Part 4 of The Book of Love is Long and Boring, covering Receiving Gifts. Somehow this series which started as a Love Languages series has instead become much more about the importance and redeeming power of love, connection, and hope in difficult times. 
> 
> Title comes from a line in Siegfried Sassoon's poem [Everyone Sang](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57253/everyone-sang). 
> 
> My posting has been patchy due to work and working on TOG Big Bang and another longer project, but hopefully got lots more to share soon. I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Thank you once again to the lovely [Mags](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieMorality/pseuds/OldMagpie) for their excellent beta, my work is always elevated so much by your kind and thoughtful edits. Also big love to my server fam for all their unconditional writing support <3

They were in Paris back in June when the news came, somewhat staticky in the clipped voice of the World Service reporter - that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot in Sarajevo. Joe sat cross legged on the floor of an innocuous apartment opposite Nicky, a _Dama_ board placed in between them - their game half finished _._ Nicky, as usual, was losing. Joe moved another one of his men forward, capturing one of Nicky’s pieces and reaching the back of the board. 

“Another king,” he said, and then looked up, his brown eyes examining Nicky who was looking over towards the windows, attention turned towards the radio. “Are you even paying attention?” 

“Hmm, yes - yes I am,” Nicky replied, although he was really thinking about the dead Archduke. He turned back to the game and made another clumsy move with a king, leaving one of his men alone and defenceless on the board. On his turn, Joe moved one of his pieces over, capturing it. Nicky pointed and asked: “Was that a king or a man?”

Joe laughed softly. 

“I’ve explained; it doesn’t matter. A man can capture a king - a king can capture a man.” 

Nicky looked down at the board again, studying how Joe had made his move. 

“You moved diagonally, so it was a king.” 

Joe nodded, and signaled for Nicky to take his turn.

“Do you think there will ever be a time without kings?” Nicky asked, trying to figure out how to isolate one of Joe’s pieces. 

Joe stretched one leg out, bracketing the board and touching Nicky’s knee with his foot. He took a sip from his coffee, and from the furrow of his eyebrows Nicky could tell he was thinking. 

“A time without kings...” Joe began. “People who go by the title of King maybe, but they are always replaced by somebody else - another King in everything but name.” 

Nicky looked back to the board. He knew the rules only vaguely, they had played this enough times that he really should know them better by now but they just never seemed to stick.

“At the end of the game, if there are two pieces left. A king and a man. The king wins.” 

Joe looked down pensively again. On the wireless, in clipped English, the reporter talked about unrest, the tenuous nature of politics, and the anti-Serb riots in Zagreb and Sarajevo. 

“That is a very rare ending to the game.” Joe made another move and another of his men finished its capture at the back of the board. “You forget as well, Nicky,” he pointed to his piece, “that every king ultimately starts as a man.” Joe signaled to him. “Your move.” 

Nicky looked at the board and tried to figure out his strategy. He made a move, capturing one of Joe’s kings that had been left open. 

“What matters,” Nicky continued, “is keeping your pieces together.” He pointed to a group of Joe’s on the board. “A group of men is ultimately stronger than one king; it’s very hard to break the line of defence then. As soon as a piece is isolated, it’s game over.” 

“Hmm,” Joe said, softly, as he ran his hand through his curls. “You’ve been reading too much Marx again.” 

“I’ve just been thinking -” Nicky stopped, tuning back into the radio again. Joe followed his gaze to the radio, the window and the outskirts of Paris beyond. The summer afternoon was hot and muggy. A lingering sense of tension permeated the air like the smell of hot rubbish. “I’ve been thinking about all the time we have spent on this earth.” 

“Do you think there will be a war?” Joe asked as if that was the logical follow on from Nicky’s comment. His tone of voice sounded as if he already knew the answer. 

“That seems like the most likely outcome,” Nicky replied matter-of-factly and reached over the board to place a hand on Joe’s outstretched leg. The voice on the radio continued its analysis. 

All the time they had been together, and everything they had seen together, meant they were firmly on the same page. Joe smiled sadly and indicated the nearly empty board. 

“Your move, my love.” 

Nicky made his move. 

Over the next few months, Europe did too. 

In the nearly nine hundred years he had lived, Nicky was sure of one thing- mankind would fight over anything. Religion; country; borders; creed; money; a strange sense of pride; or a desire for power over others. This war had flared suddenly and destroyed the tenuous thread of peace which barely held an intricate connection of agreement, violence and trust between nations together. A telegram became a breakdown of accord, that became troops on the ground, that became the stir of hatred. And from that came the blood and brains, the pain and screaming. 

The second thing Nicky was sure of was that in times of war - even one as new as this - rumours and superstitions spread faster than disease. When men were tired, hungry, beaten down and scared- the rational was replaced by the irrational. When death became something which was no longer detached and impersonal but rather a friend to be greeted with a tip of the hat every morning; religion and fear and spirituality got twisted into something _other._ Born out of desperation, born at a fragile intersection between fear and hope. Out of this meeting, deep fears and deep hopes took on new life in tangible forms and became personified in rumours, in images, in new twisted saints and in spectres. 

So, in the early days of this new war, the men in their trenches talked of the Ghosts; four men who must have been dead themselves who walked the grounds of no man’s land. The appearances of the Ghosts changed- sometimes they were in uniform; other times just in plain shirts. Some people said they were English; others said French. Some said Ottoman; some said Italian. The Ghosts were shot... drowned... blown apart again and again - but still got up to drag the injured to safety, and always spoke in the language of those they rescued. Men would wake with their wounds bandaged, mud and blood drying on their bodies, somehow alive, somehow _safe_. If you were lying in a foxhole wounded and you saw one of those Ghosts - it was a sign you were getting a second chance. 

When you met one of the Ghosts, the Tommies said, they would point you in the direction of home. Wherever, _whatever,_ home could be in this place. Back to a trench or back to comrades, back to the opportunity to do whatever this was over and over again. But you would get there alive. And sometimes, especially here, just being alive was enough. Sometimes, the hope that somebody was out there watching out for you was enough to get you through. 

“I think that’s why those stories are being passed around,” Joe said as he knelt next to a bowl of freezing water and tried to scrub mud and blood out from beneath his fingernails. “A need for hope.”

“Hope can mean a lot,” Nicky replied, counting the tourniquets and bandages in his medical bag. There weren’t enough. There was never enough. 

Andy sat a bit further from them, her cap tilted down on her head, in silence. 

“Hope means shit - ” Booker said, taking a swig from his flask and sagging into the sandbag he’d perched himself on, “ - when your legs are on one side of a mud filled cesspit and your brains on the other.” 

“A lovely image. Thanks for that, Book.” Joe gave up scrubbing his nails and pulled his gloves back on. Booker grunted as Joe walked over to him and clapped him on the back. “I think I’ll stick with the hope, my friend.” 

It was that sentiment that kept Nicky going as he waded through knee-high stinking mud streaked with blood and debris. It kept him going as he turned over bruised and bloated bodies, to find the eyes already glazed over. It kept him going when he woke from death with his head ringing and clothes shredded. And everytime he awoke again, he looked for Yusuf and reached out for his hand, swallowing his fear until he saw movement, felt heat and the soft thub of a pulse.

They spent most of their time hunched in foxholes in no man’s land, waiting for the inevitable charge, the shell fire and bodies and blood and screaming. Waiting to drag those who had fallen on both sides to their feet, but more often than not Nicky just knelt in the mud next to people as they died. If they wanted, he held them close to him, feeling hot blood seep through his clothes as he soothed them, prayed for them and watched silent and stoic as the light faded from their eyes. Once there was nothing more to be done, he stayed kneeling. His fingers squelched in the mud, cold liquid ground oozing between the gaps of them as he scrambled for purchase to pull himself up. Joe always appeared beside him and reached out his hand, and Nicky allowed himself to be pulled to his feet as more shells thudded into the earth in a shower of dirt and rock. Andy called out to them through the smoke. Then they all began to move slowly through no man’s land again like the ghosts they were said to be.

They continued like that for a few months, drifting from side to side as needed but more often than not staying in the liminal killing field which separated the two. Towards the end of December, the four of them had managed to integrate themselves with a newly arrived British group in an attempt to gain more supplies. 

The morning started like any other; wet, cold and tense with a lingering smell of death and decay in the air. Over the previous day, messages had been passed between the two sides; small ceasefires had been called and both sides had collected their dead. Nicky had gone out late with one party and helped lift barely recognisable corpses onto stretchers. He’d searched through their sodden uniforms for signs of identification, but on most of the bodies he hadn’t been able to find anything. He’d stopped in the evening gloom, staring at the corpses spread out before him and had imagined a whole field of graves. A whole field of graves without names. That was how it was in war- Nicky knew that. Didn’t mean he had to like it. 

By the time the weak winter sun rose, there was a strange mood in the air; as if something was poised and ready to spring into action. Nicky squinted through the still lingering fog. Across the barren earth, small twinkly lights could be seen through the fog in the distant trenches. They reminded Nicky of a Christmas tree he had seen in the window of a department store in London. 

“It’s probably a distraction technique,” he said. 

“Or candles?” Joe added, as he pulled his coat tighter around him. 

They both sat together at the end of a trench. They were far enough away, and hidden by a pile of sandbags, that Nicky could lean his head against Joe’s shoulder without feeling on edge. It wasn’t that male intimacy wasn’t common in the trenches - they were just always careful. Joe wrapped his arm around his back and Nicky allowed himself to sit in this rare quiet moment for a while. 

Then out of the trench in the distance, Nicolò saw figures rising, almost spectral in the fog. The figures walked forward. Then the soldiers from a bit further up in their trench _also_ started to climb out. _What are they doing?_ he thought to himself. _They are going to get themselves all killed_. 

A small group walked out, silhouetted against a sky full of snow clouds through which the sun barely managed to breach. They met the figures in the middle of no man’s land and held out their hands to shake, a universal gesture of friendship, affirming their humanity to each other. No longer meeting spectres but fellow men. 

“What are they -?” Nicky’s thoughts spilled into speech. 

Then Nicky saw the football in one of the men’s hands. 

It didn’t take long for a game to begin. From where he was sitting, Nicolò couldn’t tell which side was which. The mud stained uniforms blended together in a mess of green and brown. Voices tinged with notes of laughter carried on the still, crisp December air. Nicolò recognised German, French, English and Arabic voices. Laughter and cries of frustration as the ball passed into one of the makeshift nets blended together - cries of joy and cries of pain sounded the same in any language. The football bounced and one of the Germans kicked it with glee. Nicolò turned to Yusuf and gestured to the small crowd. 

“They will be killing each other again tomorrow,” Nicky said, with more cynicism than he really felt. 

Joe looked up sadly and took Nicky’s hand in his own. 

“They will be,” he said with a resignation in his voice. “But they are not killing each other today. We have to take something from that.” 

Nicky sighed deeply and flexed his toes in his wet socks, shivering as they squelched in his boots. Out in no man’s land the football curved through the air in an arc and he almost expected it to whistle like a shell. 

“It makes you wonder what it is all for doesn’t it? This killing for nation and country.” He pointed to one of the English soldiers. “Does our Tommy here really understand why today he is kicking a football around with Hans - whereas tomorrow he will be firing shells into no man’s land, hoping to blow his head off?”

“It’s the nature of war, though, isn’t it Nico?” Joe said, his voice calm. “It moves like a spectre across countries drawing strength from pride and power and nation and some _notion_ of what it means to be a man.” His voice softened, becoming tender, the warmth of Joe’s heart shining through. “Even with all our years, I don’t think I will ever understand it.”

Nicolò squeezed Joe’s hand harder. 

“It just feels unnecessary.” Nicky breathed out deeply, resting his head back against one of the beams holding the trench together. “I hate modern warfare, sitting in a trench and waiting for something to come out of the sky and blow you to smithereens.” War had always been ugly, but it felt different now. Nicky thought back, way back, to the fields outside of Jerusalem with all the trees cut away and the earth wet with blood and filth under his boots. He thought of the siege towers, his hand shaking around a crossbow and he climbed and fell and climbed again. Crossbows were now replaced with guns; boiling oil and fire with whistling shells and gas. Nicky swallowed the thought and added, “there is a very particular type of dread to it.” 

“There is.” 

Joe had a particular gift of seeing beauty even in great ugliness. He truly understood the need for love and for art in slowly repairing the wounds humanity always insisted on tearing in the fabric of their existence. Nicky had a much harder time seeing that. 

“I can’t see any poetry coming out of this place.”

Joe rubbed a hand up and down Nicolò’s thigh as if he was trying to rub warmth into his body. 

“You can find poetry everywhere, Nicolò- even in times of great despair there is some poetry waiting to be written.” Joe paused and more sounds of the football game drifted into the trench. “That is the strength of poetry. It can take something ugly and find the beauty within it.”

Nicky thought of the foxholes. 

He thought of blood and guts and arterial bleeds. 

He thought of cold dead glassy eyes staring through him, looking deep, _deep_ into his soul into somewhere beyond that, beyond him. As if they could see - as if they _contained -_ all the emptiness in the world. No poetry could capture that. 

“I just can’t see any here.” 

Joe hummed sadly and they fell into silence. They sat and watched the game as if it was unfolding before them on a village field. Snow fell in light sheets and Nicky saw it rest in the curls of Joe’s hair and on his eyelashes. Joe blinked the melting droplets away and wiped his eyes on the back of his coat. _He is beautiful_ , Nicky thought. _Even in this place, he is beautiful._ Wherever Yusuf walked, some beauty was born. 

A group of men somewhere further up the trench started to sing. Their shaky tenors and baritones mixed together around the words: 

_Silent night, holy night_

_All is calm, all is bright_

Then, further away, almost lost in the wind, voices echoed back: 

_Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_

_Alles schläft; einsam wacht_

The sound was mournful in a way, the harmony lost and the vocals weak without the projection of a church ceiling. The way the voices carried on the wind stirred a particular sadness within Nicolò and he felt his eyes start to well up. He couldn’t really ascertain how he was feeling- it was beautiful and broken and heartbreaking all at the same time. Together, they both sat and listened. 

Then, after a while, Joe spoke up. 

“I got you something, you know?” 

Nicolò turned to him and raised an eyebrow, confused. “For what?”

“It’s Christmas,” Joe replied with a small laugh. 

“So?” 

“I got you a present.” 

Joe reached into his pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. The writing on the box was faded and it was crushed in on one side. “These are for you - all different types unfortunately. I managed to scrounge them together over the last few months.” 

Nicky could see Joe collecting them for him, bartering for a cigarette he didn’t smoke; finding a few tucked away in an abandoned jacket and probably winning one in a bet against Booker. Despite himself, for the first time in a long time; Nicky felt the tears which had built up in his eyes slowly fall down his face. 

“I - I - um didn’t get you anything,” he said as Joe pressed the packet into his hand. 

“Don’t worry,” Joe said, his voice soft and sweet. “We never usually do anything for Christmas, I just wanted to do this for you. You won’t be going to Mass this year, so I thought it would be nice.” 

“It’s very sweet, thank you.” Nicky took one of the cigarettes out of the packet reached in his pocket for his matches and lit it. He drew in the acrid smoke and breathed out, allowing it to warm him from the inside. “It’s very thoughtful.” He paused and turned to Joe and said, sincerely and truthfully as if it wasn’t the thousandth time these words had left his mouth, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Joe said and turned his head from side to side, performing a cursory check that they were alone. Satisfied they were, he cupped his hand around Nicolò’s cheek and pulled him in for a kiss. His lips and face were cold and Nicolò knew his mouth would taste of tobacco and dirt. Nicolò deepened the kiss, holding the lit cigarette in one hand and drawing his other down the front of Yusuf’s uniform, feeling the swell of his chest and the beat of his heart. Eventually they pulled away and Nicolò looked into Yusuf’s big brown eyes and was transported away from this place, to a different world of warmth and safety. 

He pressed a final kiss to Joe’s cold nose. Yusuf’s big, broad, toothy smile when he pulled away was enough to make Nicolò believe again. 

“Okay,” Nicolò said, catching his breath. “I guess there is some poetry in this place after all.”

Joe leaned in again, resting his head against Nicky’s shoulder. 

“I am forever surrounded by poetry when you are near me.” 

From anybody else but Joe, those words would have sounded empty. From him they were nothing short of the truth. Nicolò smiled back. The fog had cleared a bit now, giving him a better view of the football game. It was riotous and unskilled and beautiful. The very air and feel of the place seemed to have shifted - becoming a little lighter and less oppressive. 

“Merry Christmas, Yusuf,” he said. 

“Merry Christmas, Nicolò.”

Later there would be bodies to collect, mud to sift through and the minor wounds of the men in the trench to clean and dress. But, for now, Nicky enjoyed his cigarette, allowed his cold hand to be warmed against Yusuf’s knee and watched the small lights twinkle in the German trench across the way. For now, there was a reprieve from the violence. In his many years of living and dying, that was the one thing Nicky always wanted to hold onto. Yusuf was better at it - but Nicky did try. 

Out across the mud and down the trenches, distant voices continued to sing. Even a temporary reprieve was a welcome one. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. This fic is based upon the [Christmas Truce](https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-the-christmas-truce) of 1914 which happened on the Western Front. I have used some artistic license with the exact events but tried to keep it as accurate as possible. At the start, Nicky and Joe are playing [Dama](https://www.mindsports.nl/index.php/on-the-evolution-of-draughts-variants/draughts-variants/502-dama_t) also known as Turkish Draughts, a game very popular in countries around the Mediterranean Sea and the wider Middle East. Reports of supernatural occurrences in World War One fascinate me, so this inspired my take on how ordinary soldiers would see the members of the Old Guard in this situation. 
> 
> Once again thank you so much for reading, all comments and critiques are welcome - I love to hear from you all!


End file.
